


Grand Chasm

by Zafaria



Category: Wizard101
Genre: Fantasy, Gen, Magic, Short Story, Wizard, i'd like to thank my squad for proofreading this ten-page short story, what legends
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-28
Updated: 2017-11-28
Packaged: 2019-02-08 02:27:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,094
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12854772
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zafaria/pseuds/Zafaria
Summary: Dragonspyre has changed a lot over the ages.





	Grand Chasm

**I. We Owe It to Ourselves**

  They say they've never seen water turn to fire; running river morph into slow flows of lava. And some may even have the mind to say it isn't possible.

  The belief that the two are so wildly different is what drove the land to its end.

 

**II. You Can Sleep in a Coffin...**

  When the war came it was fight or flight. They stood their ground, they perished. Or they could condemn themselves to a vault, where they would live out the rest of their days until, eventually, they rotted away. In essence, living in their deathbed.

  There was no alert system. They got an early start to the vaults and a late end to them. Few ghosts knew much about who exactly was cast away into the vaults, they were so caught up in their own ordeals. No one ever re-emerged, no one was aware that the wartime had come and gone.

 

**III. Warkeeper**

   In one vault, there was a Commander of the Army, tasked with watching over the success of the operation. People had been rushed into the metal hatches where emergency apportionments were prepared months beforehand. It was known to those who remained above to fight what vault the Commander was in. At the end of the war, they would come to that vault and retrieve him first. This was for security. If it was a cruel trick by the beasts, the Commander would know how to fight them back. If it was truly escape from the dim life in the safes, he would systematically open the rest and release the others back into their home.

     Tacticians were divided into groups that would organize the efforts in various districts. Usually, they would represent the military, business, and residents of a zone. Within the safes, only the military interest was represented. The populace of vault-dwellers was too fragmented and removed from the outside world to have any form of business or any need for diplomacy. The Commander was the presiding officer here. The plan also ensured that one senior military officer with intimate details about the workings of the Army would survive.

      The world hungered for military training and order. All residents who could be conscripted were. Nothing could surmount their defense, infallible, flawless, shielded by brashness. The wise placement of vaults and safehouses would ensure that the people of the land could survive as their homes and shops crumbled in battle.

     It was the most skilled army of any of the worlds. Impressive and impenetrable. Before the war began, they thought they could crown the winner. Scaled beasts and chitinous giant spiders would be crushed under tread.

     This was the idea, at least. There was no contingency plan.

 

**IV. Buried Alive**

    He wrote in a journal to chronicle his life living in a small, cold, stone square. A bottle of ink stood on his desk. It was drying, with almost half the bottle used, etching his story into parchment. Placing his pen gently, he looked up from his writing and stared at the wall that sat on the other side of his desk. His face was pallid and almost green in tint, his eyes deeply sunken above gaunt cheeks. A drop of ink fell off the metal nib of the pen onto the desk.

   The room was brilliant and reflective. He was locked in the vault with the emergency reserves of the Treasury. Crystals and gold were strewn about in the corners. Patience for someone to come and collect him had waned, curiosity for the state of the world outside had waxed. Many times, László had wondered how many years it had been since he started living a restricted life in the vault. He needed to know. And so, he walked over to where the crystals were and selected a green one from the pile. It was the size of his hand, with sharp edges. He staggered over to the granite blocks of the wall that kept him from the world. A pointed edge of the crystal sticking out of his hand, he wielded it like a dagger and stabbed the wall. The point of the crystal fractured into prismatic shapes against the force of striking the wall. The fragments fell on the floor noiselessly.

     László had only succeeded in leaving a small indentation. It was not visible, but he ran his finger over the spot in the brick and felt the notch from the crystal. He tried again to bore a larger hole in the brick with another point on the jewel. Again, it cleaved into smaller pieces. 

     He stopped a moment and stared at the spot he had been hitting.  A new approach, he decided. He took the gemstone and scraped at the wall with it. It left silvery, chalky marks on the brick, but no depressions. Frustrated, he let the green stone fall on the ground and shatter as he returned to the Treasury resources to find a stronger jewel. Purple, red, blue, or yellow; all different varieties of gems all yielded the same, meager results. Lacerations opened on his hand from clenching the crystals so vigorously, so hopefully.

     Something, something in the room could be used to create a link to the outside. He knew of it. He believed it.

   As he turned to look behind him, the glint of the fading lanterns caught on the metal nib of his pen. The beacons had started bright and glowing like the light of the sun when they were first crafted. Over the years, they became yellowed and fuzzy. He leaned over his desk thinking. The last semblance of life as it was, his journal and pen were always laid out on the desk. Many of his days were inscribed in the journal. Meticulous recording of everything brought him some sanity; the routine was comforting. The pen was a gift from a dear friend from his previous life, and without it, his story would cease to be written.

  He lurched for it and walked swiftly back to the wall, re-energized but shaky. He took a breath before beginning once more. Slowly, he began to carefully chisel away the stone block. Pieces of granite from the wall fell away in flakes.

 

**V. Try and See It All**

   The wall thinned out gradually.

   László was tired and starved. His food was low, his spirits lower, as he began to make the final swipes at the granite blocks that he was entombed in. A tiny piece of the granite broke off, liberated from the rest of the wall. When it gave way and fell to the outside of the wall, a small peephole was revealed.

    Taking the pen, László began to break off pebbles of the wall adjacent to the hole. His hands were calloused and his nails filled with sediment from working on the wall. He, like the granite blocks, was shaved away from what was perhaps years of work.

    He squinted to see through the small break in the wall. His eyes burned with the heat from outside. From the natural sun, he thought. When he looked toward the sky, what sliver of it he could see, it was not blue how he had left it. It was hazy and purple, burning with smoke. The opal stones of the streets were cracked, and most horrifyingly, draconians roamed freely. They seemed unaware to the true nature of all the vaults they patrolled around, just that they contained something important.

    Time had not seemed to pass in the vault. At least, László never felt like it, possibly because he could never gauge how long it had been. But now, looking at his world in throes, he felt old and paltry. It was the end of an era. It was the end of the land.

     He was desperate to know. He called out to one of the patrolling reptiles.

    “The war… is it lost?”

    “Surely! This world, it is ours now. You and yours’ time has ended, you sniveling, puny whelp,” it gloated. It was a ruddy orange color, armored in scales with luminous amber eyes.

   “A-and… the others?” he asked. “Where…?”

    "We were tired of them. We aren't horrid monsters though!" The draconian let out a wicked, shrill laugh at the irony of this. "Your dead were everywhere. So, we found the highest ranking amongst your fallen armies and entombed them. We had no space for the footsoldiers and they were wasting away on the walkways, so we shoved them into the magma flows."

     At this, László took a moment to look beyond the tormenting drakes. And he saw. Once, where water ran crystalline and clear, magma crawled. Between the walkways, under bridges and through grates, further and further and further until it spilled out over the edge of the land into the nihility of unending, open space. That was where his brothers and sisters in arms were.

     The draconian leered at László. “If you want to come out here, you can join them too!”

 

**VI. Vacant Hope**

     Fear of the world and what it had become took root. László vowed never to go outside, to face the dangers lurking beyond his wall. He saw his time left in the vault as reprieve. A dull piece of obsidian from the Treasury reserves was now protruding from the wall; he had used it to block the small hole that he had worked so hard to chip out earlier. The heat and blazes of the outside world remained there and there only, no longer infiltrating the space. His pen was damaged from using it as a stone-carving tool, and so his journal continued in blurred and illegible scribbles on the pages; a history lost.

    There were few months of hazy, ephemeral light left before the flames in the lanterns flickered out forever. After the light disappeared, the food followed.

 

**VII. Grand Design**

     Death represented a kind of freedom. He was no longer confined to a physical space, although his soul was bound to the realm and area where the vaults were; after all, it was his duty to watch over them. Others who had passed during the battles faced a similar complication.

     László worked with the commanding officers of the army that he had once known in life. Together, they devised a strategy for how they were to cleanse their world of the roaming monsters. Their land destroyed, their allies passed, they were cautious and thoughtful in their plans. It was crafted perfectly. All it required was someone living.

 

**VIII. Hold onto Faith**

     Ghosts littered the streets of the land, aimlessly walking, searching. The Basilica was the only survived place accessible to travelers. Of course, it was fragmented and severed from the rest of the land. When courageous visitors stumbled upon the land, they would wind their way down a long, spiraling mountain, into a portico that was empty and extended nowhere.

     A peerless visitor, naive and hopeful, arrived one day. The people in the vaults perished two hundred years before.

 

**IX. A Tourist**

     The young wizard daringly ventured into the collapsed land, chasing a nemesis through the many worlds to the fallen towers and cracked flagstones. The evil they were roiling so hard against was holed up in a fortress, high up on a volcano. It jutted up from the flat top of the mountain, taunting and mocking the magus. There was a large hole in the wall of the castle. Their opponent would stand in the center from time to time and look out over the decimated world.

     Wrapped around the other side of the building, the Dragon slept. A titan of the universe, the Dragon was the originator of fire and everything molten. Once awoken, it would spread the same decimation to all lands, leaving only scorched earth and singed remnants of the inhabitants.

     This, the wizard vowed, would never happen.

     The augurer stopped in front of a large ogee arch. Between it, nothing. Three of these were poised in the vacant veranda. But there should’ve been something; at least according to the readings they steeled themselves with before journeying into the foreign land.

    They sat down in front of it and fixed their eyes ahead. They waited. After a time, they decided that patience was not the test of virtue required. It would take vision and creativity, perhaps, to access the secrets that the land had kept concealed for so long. So, they meditated on the thought of what the rest of the world was like in the better age.

     Their mind settled on a grand castle that led to an atrium. Inside, it was filled with three floors of books, some charred and some sliding off the edge of shelves that had been dislodged long ago. A crystal chandelier's chain to the ceiling had snapped. It fell and lay crushed in the center of the entire building. It was a library, they figured. But where was the librarian?

    As they conjured the image of this place, they began to feel more and more that it was a location that did exist, and could still exist. They continued staring ahead.

    Instead of looking past the arch, into the wall, they began to feel as if they were looking through the arch. They saw red flagstone streets paralleled by lava. A large ramp up to buildings that oversaw the world on a cliff. Perhaps one of those was the wizard's building from their mind. The atrium was partitioned from the places beyond it by a defensive wall. Three grandiose sets of doors were embedded in the wall, passages to places further and further in the land.

     _This... this is right_ , thought the wizard.

     As they had constructed the world in their mind, a portal in the archway began to construct itself as well. It was very real, and the wizard hazarded a guess that this is what they needed to continue on.

     They stuck their hand through the swimming image of the atrium and peered around the edge of it to find that their arm did not appear on the other side, in the Basilica. They stepped up into the portal and disappeared.

     The door to the building was heavy with years of ache from withstanding the destruction around it. After putting their whole being into it, the door gave way to the small figure with a heavy creak. They found a ghost in the old library, a keeper of lore. His solemn duty during the great war was to ensure that the history of his people was retained; that floors of legends and people and myths made it to the age beyond all the devastation.

     Milos, he said his name was. This was the wizard’s first encounter in the land with another being. Although pensive, Milos could offer little in the way of help to the wizard. His soul obligated to the library, he could only direct the sorcerer to where his colleagues had been stationed. The wizard departed, alone in their adventure to unravel the ties of carnage and loss that constrained the world. For a moment, they wondered. The world had been powerful, conspicuous. Yet, they found themselves meandering between fallen buildings and half-collapsed columns. A glorious empire, made into dust and rubble. Folly led the people to believe they were stronger than the Dragon and its children. Defeat was strange and alien to them. They lived shrouded in laurels, weaknesses eclipsed by a barrage of acclaim.

     The towers of the fortress continued to loom in the distance. Eerily, ominously. Aerosols of ash and smoke curled up and around the world. A fire fountain released a bubbling flare into the air with a _hiss_.

 

**X. Field of Fire**

    They exchanged their help dispelling the creatures for the way to the towering mountaintop. Cleansing the world was a footnote in their grand struggle. They happened upon the vaults. Rows and rows of scarred metal hatches; and behind each hatch, who knew? Who remembered?

    A ghost in military decorum had waited at the entrance to the vaults for decades to greet the wizard. He requested help in purifying the area. The vaults, he said, should not be the wizard’s burden. This belonged to him. He knew what was behind them. He was, at one point, behind one himself. There was no need to open the hatches. He turned to watch the wizard as they departed down the cobblestones, past the vault that he used to inhabit. A shard of obsidian rock stuck out of the wall.

   They walked down the street, past the unyielding barriers that gripped their contents, a relentless enigma. The wizard clambered over smashed bridges to the end of the walk, to the end of the world.   

  And there, a demon. A didko, tremendous and immovable, its true nature ugly, boisterous, and enormous. Often, it found another being that it would inhabit and leech off of.

     The wizard had met this type before. Arrogant, it thoughtlessly entered into duels, though it could be bested.  When defeated, the person that veiled them would be shed, crumpled moribund at the demon’s feet, and wither away. Sometimes this was accompanied by the rattles of death, sometimes agonizing shrieking, sometimes terrified muteness. They would look upwards or at the wizard in awe, glazed, and then tense for a moment before their soul escaped them. The didko would still be present, released in its genuine form, rushing toward the sorcerer to slay them.

     They only made the mistake of looking to the eyes of the used husk of a being once. It was haunting. The scene played in their mind in frequent and recurrent night terrors. Each iteration, the didko was stronger, crueler.

    A fist clenched around their stave. A golden firebrand entwined with a lustrous red orb at the top, a miniature iteration of the sleeping titan itself.

     For a moment, the wizard felt that in their travels, they had been much like the people of the world they now trespassed in. Valiant, but blind to their shortcomings. If the Dragon was to be summoned, their quest could end the universe in the same smoldering fate. The story of the world, though sorrowful and incomprehensible, was a warning. The uneasy inkling was dismissed as a brief lapse; unnecessary and false self-doubt. These thoughts were banished.

     They approached the demon at the end of the row of vaults, where the lava poured off the edge of the world and the purple obsidian rocks of the land met the violent, turbulent sky. Space below; an unforgiving chasm.

**Author's Note:**

> Aware that there are some things discontinuous in here. But let's face it. If I was a normal person reading this, "Vasek" would just be a name that's _too weird_.
> 
> BIGGEST of thanks to my good friends Risa and Angie for proof'ing this! EVEN BIGGER thanks to my sister Pook!!


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